In My Own Time; almost an autobiography – Nina Bawden (1994)

Carrie’s War was one of the books of my childhood, I think I have carried the memory of that book and the 1970s TV adaptation of it with me ever since. I rediscovered Nina Bawden as an adult, and it was like re-connecting with an old friend. I’ve come to believe that not everyone enjoys Nina Bawden’s writing as much as I do. Naturally – as with many prolific writers – her novels do vary a little in quality. Although I have read only about eight of her twenty adult novels, I have found her to be a writer of great insight and a superb storyteller.

With In My Own Time , Bawden tells her own story – in a series of, frequently very honest – vignettes starting naturally enough with her childhood. I loved every word of this book, and was rather bereft when it was over, not only did I love the stories of Nina Bawden’s life, I realised as I neared the end – that I really liked her.

Nina Bawden was born in 1925 in London, this collection of memoirs opens with memories of her family, aunts, uncles, grandparents and her own parents. Family stories of a ship’s cook, and an old tramp – the memory of whom, Nina’s mother would rather have had erased completely.

In the years before the war, the child Nina always made up stories to amuse herself and her younger brother. Showing an early aptitude for art, which Nina’s mother was keen to encourage, Nina was sent for extra art tuition, which she hated, and from which whooping cough delivered her. During the war, Nina was evacuated, an experience she used later for her famous children’s novel Carrie’s War – though Bawden, stresses that story was not her own. Nina was moved between foster families several times, the families she stayed with all rather different to her own, though she recalls them here with some affection and gratitude. Relating the time when her mother came to visit, and Nina worked hard to protect her latest ‘auntie’ from her mother’s probable scorn, if she realised what a hopeless housekeeper Nina was staying with. When in the first year of sixth form, Nina, along with many of the other girls billeted nearby returned to London. Nina stayed with her friend Jean for a while. The Blitz was over, but flying bombs and land mines were common.

“I was curiously unafraid. There was even an exquisite excitement sometimes, listening to the engines of death above me. If I were to write about living in a city under siege, I would be able to describe the sharpened sense of that danger gave to ordinary life, the exhilaration of having survived the night, the bomb, the mine, but it would seem crudely insensitive to write about someone who was not in the least afraid. I was afraid of lots of things; the dentist, being alone in a house (listening for a clicking latch, a creaking stair) but I was not afraid of bombs. Of course emotions fade from memory, or sometimes, if remembered, seem unbelievable after a lapse of years.”

Soon Nina joined her mother in the country, a farmhouse in the Welsh Marches. In 1943 Nina went to Oxford. She had been going to read French, but soon transferred to Modern Greats. While at Oxford, Nina met Margaret Thatcher (though she wasn’t yet Mrs Thatcher) and Richard Burton, who she hadn’t found especially attractive. She recalls fire watching in the university buildings, playing planchette on the roof of the Bodleian library, and sleeping on a camp bed in the museum, it was undoubtedly a happy time.

In 1946 Nina married her first husband, Harry Bawden, with whom she had two sons. Later Nina met Austen Kark on a bus, and left her husband for him, she is pretty matter of fact about this, and there isn’t a word of criticism for her first husband whose name she kept for her books. Having published some short stories her first novel came out in 1953. Who Calls the Tune, came out to very good reviews. A mistake Bawden made over the naming of one particularly unpleasant character, lead to a letter, very nearly making it her last novel – it taught her a valuable lesson – to thoroughly ensure her character names weren’t names of people she had once known. Bawden describes how she wrote, an adult’s novel one year, a children’s novel the next. Admitting that some autobiographical material seeps in, Bawden considers central characters to be generally too complex, needing to be known by their creator too thoroughly to be completely taken from life. She was fortunate in her publisher; sticking faithfully to George Hardinge as he moved from one publishing house to another from 1954 until 1987.

The most moving section of this book however is in Bawden’s descriptions of her family – their life together, their trials and tribulations. Nina’s sons Niki and Robert were young enough to accept their stepfather Austen quite happily, though their own father was still involved in their lives too. Later Nina had a daughter; Perdita with Austen, Austen had two daughters from his first marriage, with whom Nina seems to have had a good relationship when they visited. However, it was Nina’s eldest son who was to give her the greatest worry and heartache. Niki’s problems began to surface when he was just a boy, and Nina and Austen did all they could to find the help Niki needed. Later he was diagnosed as schizophrenic, and here Nina remembers him with honesty and sadness but overwhelmingly with great love.

“He was a loving, valiant child. Once, when he overheard us groaning about some alarming and unexpected bill, he packed up his best toys, weeping, and gave them to us to sell. And one summer holiday, when he jumped off a breakwater and landed on a nail and the matron at the cottage hospital stitched up his foot without an anaesthetic, he sat quite still on Austen’s lap and made no sound. But my mother had been right when she had called him vulnerable. He was more fragile than his brother and sister, more unsure of himself, more easily upset, and as he grew older, in his teens, his fragility became more apparent. Sometimes you could see his face betraying inner terror, as if he were shivering inside his skin.”

Niki’s story is a sad one, and his mother fights hard for him, she writes about him with striking honesty – and I really felt for a woman who I knew went on to face other tragedies after this book was written. Austen was killed in the Potters Bar rail crash of 2002 – and (herself injured) Nina Bawden’s own evidence formed a vital part of the investigation and she later appeared as a character in David Hare’s play about the crash. Her final published book was Dear Austen (2005) a letter she wrote to her dead husband about that crash and all that followed. Nina Bawden died in 2012, a few months after her daughter Perdita’s death.

In My Own Time is a wonderful memoir, and it has convinced me to read more Nina Bawden novels this year.

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The Ice House – Nina Bawden (1983)

Nina Bawden’s 1983 novel The Ice House is a subtle exploration of friendship, deception and betrayal. There are four sections to this short, psychologically astute novel; friendship, marriage, love and the Ice house, which charts the changing nature of a friendship over the course of more than thirty years. I don’t think this is the best of the Bawden novels that I have read, although I liked it immensely. She does seem to be a writer who divides opinion – but there is a lot to admire in these portrayals of marriage and friendship. I feel as if I often like her novels rather more than other reviewers – I like writers who are coolly observant, and so Bawden’s style suits my tastes exactly.

“That summer Saturday in 1951, Daisy Brown aged fifteen, going to tea with Ruth Perkin, also aged fifteen had an unusual sense of adventure.”

At fifteen, Daisy and Ruth are uneasy friends. When Daisy receives an unexpected invitation to Ruth’s house for tea, she is excited to cross the threshold of a house no one else has been invited to before. Ruth Perkin’s family are wealthy, their house a turreted mock-baronial mansion behind tall gates, it also boasts an old ice house in the grounds. Ruth; an only child, appears cosseted by an over anxious mother, rarely ventures to the houses of her friends, she is quiet and slightly secretive about her home life. Daisy Brown comes from a relaxed loving home, a home life she takes a little for granted as no doubt, we all do at that age. Daisy is therefore shocked, and deeply disturbed by the realities of Ruth’s family life. On the day Daisy visits Ruth and her parents, she encounters the war-damaged harshly, abusive Captain Perkins, and sees for herself where Ruth’s silence and reticence comes from, recognising her need to escape into her passion for dress-making.

“Captain Perkin said, ‘I daresay you have lots of boyfriends, Daisy,’ and she was conscious that her last year’s summer dress was too tight across the chest. Blushing slightly, she owned to ‘quite a few’, adding, ‘My mother says there is safety in numbers.’ She rolled her eyes flirtatiously at Captain Perkin. She couldn’t help it. Flirting was as natural to Daisy as breathing. ‘I hope your mother knows what she is doing,’ Captain Perkin said. ‘I am careful with Ruth. But I have seen a bit of the world, you understand. I know what men are, with ripe young girls.’ He spluttered as he laughed, as if his mouth was full of juice. And, with a gloating emphasis, ‘I know what girls are, come to that!’ His eyes were on her breasts.”

The experience of that day unites the girls further, and leads to a friendship which lasts well into middle age. Thirty years after that afternoon at the Perkin’s house, Daisy and Ruth are still best friends; they are married to Luke and Joe respectively who are also best friends. The two families live very near to one another, and their teenage children are great friends too. When Daisy’s husband is killed suddenly in a motorway accident, the truths that Ruth was so certain of are severely disrupted. Daisy reveals that she had been bored by her marriage, that things were far from perfect. For Daisy nothing can fully replicate or better the love and security she experienced growing up with her parents and brother. Ruth is starting to feel a little insecure, her husband Joe has been becoming more and more distant, and in his grief over his friend’s death he is hard to reach. Ruth begins to suspect that her husband may be keeping something from her, fearing he may even have betrayed her. In middle-age Daisy is a larger, more gregarious woman than Ruth, and Ruth appears diminished at times by the sheer force of Daisy’s personality. Ruth has been happily fulfilled by her successful seamstress business, but when her faith in Joe is shaken, she is forced back to the realities of her childhood, and the betrayal she endured at the hands of her father.

Bawden’s characters are generally not very warm, but she explores their complexities with subtlety and understanding that fleshes out their entire worlds, their pasts and futures are instantly believable. The men in this novel are portrayed as pathetic or predatory, or a mixture of the two; the women by comparison are strong even in their apparent weakness. I am reminded a little of Elizabeth Taylor whose peripheral characters are always as well executed and deftly explored as her central characters, here Bawden’s minor characters are just as superbly drawn. One of my favourite characters from this novel, Daisy’s cynical, ageing mother-in-law Lady Stella Brett, who has recently befriended an old man she met in some nearby gardens, entertaining him to breakfast.

“Stella loomed over her. She smelled of old clothes. She said ‘Do you want tea? Walter had the last of the coffee. Otherwise there is whiskey, or some rather unpleasant sweet sherry. I don’t know where it came from. One of the boys brought it, probably. It isn’t my tipple.
Ruth shook her head. Who was Walter? The last thing she wanted was alcohol. But Stella was already pouring whiskey into two tumblers. She gave one to Ruth. ‘Drink up, you look a bit peaky.”

I am trying hard not to give away spoilers here – however there are things in The Ice House which become fairly obvious to the reader and when fully revealed come as no surprise – I think that is intentional – the reader is instantly ‘in on’ the secret.

Nina Bawden is particularly adept at showing the darker sides of human nature, her novels generally peter out gently rather than with a melodramatic flourish – some readers call it anti-climactic, I tend to think of it as being more like real life.

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The Solitary Child – Nina Bawden (1976)

Thankfully for Nina Bawden fans Bello books have a number of her titles available in both paperback and ebook editions, I must say I find their ebooks great value. Nina Bawden is an author who I have come to really admire; she was a quite prolific writer, writing for both adults and children over a career spanning many years.

The Solitary Child, I suspect is one title that is a little less well known than some of her others, another reason to be grateful to Bello.

“As the years pass, remembering becomes an academic exercise, a kind of cosy reckoning—a private game kept for the solitary train journeys, the white nights. You finish the crossword puzzle, read the new novel, but memory is inexhaustible, waiting to be taken out and examined without pain, touched inquiringly, like an old scar. There is no longer any emotion involved; what remains is pictorial and vivid. The little things stand out, the fly on the wall, the coffee stain on the carpet.”

When twenty-two year old Harriet becomes engaged to the much older James Random after knowing him less than a fortnight, she faces an uphill struggle to have her relationship accepted. James is a gentleman farmer from the Welsh borders, whose first wife Eva died in what had been described as ‘unforgettable circumstances.’ James had been charged, and tried with her murder, later acquitted a shadow hangs over him, suspicion lurking in the minds of many. When Harriet’s mother discovers the identity of Harriet’s fiancé she is devastated, but her concern seems to rest mainly with what her char lady thinks. Harriet marries James without her mother there to see her, before going to Switzerland on honeymoon for two months.

Following the honeymoon, the newlyweds arrive home, to the farm where James had lived with Eva, the place where she died a violent death. James’s sister Ann is waiting for them, she lives close by in a couple of Victorian cottages, saddled with a hypochondriac friend who she is forever running back to. Harriet soon senses strains between James and Ann, things not said, and Ann’s other friend – Cyril who had once wanted to marry Ann, is clearly not someone James wants around. James’s sixteen year old daughter who has been living with her mother’s parents is reported missing on the night of James and Harriet’s return home; everyone seems to think she is heading back to the farm. Harriet is rather shocked by her husband’s attitude towards Maggie – who he clearly does not want at home. Eva was apparently a selfish, damaged woman, who made James’s life a misery – is Maggie like her mother? Is she a painful reminder to James or are there things Harriet doesn’t yet know? When Harriet discovers Maggie hiding in the old servant’s quarters, she immediately feels protective towards the childlike girl.

“She crouched on the floor in a corner, huddled still and small like a hunted animal, plaster powdered like snow on her navy, reefer coat. She had, only recently, been out in the rain. Her wet, blond hair clung sleekly to her head, her eyes, wide and grey and steady, stared at me with a remote expression as if she were only half awake or did not see me properly. “You must be my step-mother,” she said. Her voice was light and hasty, trailing into silence. She stood up; her schoolgirl’s coat, unbuttoned, hung about her like a sack.”

Maggie is a complicated mix of contradictions, young for her age and childlike although obviously very sexual and completely aware of the effect she has on others. Manipulating Harriet’s liking for her, Maggie ensures she is able to stay despite her father wanting her to go back to her grandparents. Maggie is a very strange character; there are times when she seems too young – Harriet appears strangely blind to her obvious oddness and I found Harriet’s total absorption in Maggie a little unbelievable – but that is a small point after all this is a woman who married a man in unseemly haste.

Harriet slowly begins to doubt so much that she had taken for granted, the whispers of others about James’s guilt begin to sow seeds of doubt – doubts she valiantly tries to push aside. The more she hears about Eva and the events of the day she died, the more she realises why so many people said James was the only one who could have done it. Cruel, anonymous letters sent to Harriet also shake her a little, a fall down the stairs – which might have been a push, and a devastating miscarriage take their toll on Harriet and she begins to look at James in a new way.

There is a brilliant oppressiveness to this novel, the farm and the people who live and work there are superbly portrayed – as is the nosey little journalist who pops up adding fuel to the fire, and the slimy young man with whom it is said Eva had had an affair. Their world feels like a world of shadows and secrets, and Harriet becomes less and less certain of what is real.

“Harriet.” I turned and James was standing above me, at the top of the slope, black against the moon. He was about four feet away from me and he was carrying a gun. I had a sick and vivid picture. She was shot at close range, shot as she turned from the bridge because he called to her. And then I saw that it wasn’t a gun on his arm but a walking-stick.”

The Solitary Child is enormously readable, an atmospheric novel with an intriguing mystery at the heart of it. It is also a well written study in uncomfortable relationships; Nina Bawden explores her characters astutely, and the way in which she teases out the mystery at the heart of this story makes it hard to put down.

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The Odd Flamingo – Nina Bawden (1954)

I don’t think I had realised that Nina Bawden had ever written mystery novels, but it seems that she did, in fact her first few novels were mysteries. This novel from 1954 was only her second published novel. The Odd Flamingo while not having quite the depth of character and subtlety of her later more literary works is a quick engaging little mystery, with some flashes of what would come in later novels. There is no doubt that The Odd Flamingo, shows many of the strengths of Nina Bawden’s writing, but it is also apparent that it was written by a young writer, still honing her craft. Nina Bawden however is an excellent storyteller, and that is certainly evident in The Odd Flamingo. The setting of this mystery is definitely one of its strengths, brilliantly atmospheric; Bawden’s seedy world is one that feels very realistic and very 1950’s.

“I had no premonition of disaster. Later I remembered that there had been a bowl of roses on the table by the telephone and that, as I had picked up the receiver, I had been comparing the dead bloom with the clear crimson of a bud from the same bush and wondering whether there was anything that could be done to stop the red roses from blue-ing so badly when they opened fully.
Celia said, “Will,is that you? Oh, thank God. Can you come down to the School?”
I asked her what was the matter and she said, “I can’t tell you on the ‘phone. Please come.”
She sounded both frightened and distraught. It was unlike her.”

The Odd Flamingo is rooted in the world of nightclubs, spivs, drugs and petty criminals, with young women who have taken the wrong path, anxious to escape their dreary existences. The story is narrated by Will Hunt, a lawyer who lives with his mother, and has idolised his friend Humphrey Stone for years. Will is an interesting character although not as deeply explored as I would have expected from Nina Bawden, his feelings for Humphrey are ambiguous, especially as we meet a woman as the story progresses who Will loved years earlier. In setting her novel among the people and places of the heaving London underbelly of the 1950’s Bawden has moved right away from many of the cosy crime novels of the period, all those country house mysteries she must have read herself.

Humphrey Stone is a respected school headmaster, whose wife Celia is visited by a beautiful young girl, Rose Blacker, who announces she is pregnant by Humphrey. Celia is naturally appalled, fearful for her family’s reputation; she immediately turns to Will for help with the delicate situation. Rose produces love letters, written in Humphrey’s unmistakable voice and hand. Will is keen to help, and while speaking to Rose he becomes fascinated and drawn to the strange innocence that he sees in her. However, barely can Will begin to ascertain the exact nature of the situation before a murder looks like taking things to a much darker place. Will begins to question everything he knows about Humphrey, but determined to help him where he can.

Will’s enquires bring Will back to the Odd Flamingo club, a place Will had visited a few times years before with Humphrey. Will had no idea that Humphrey was still a regular, and is shocked to hear that his old friend had been there with Rose and her close friend Jasmine. The Odd Flamingo is frequented by all sorts of unsavoury types, and it is also here that Will runs into his former love Kate. While trying to track down the elusive Humphrey, Will must also run the gauntlet that is Piers Stone, Humphrey’s odious and manipulative half-brother. As Will delves deeper he uncovers some unsavoury truths about some of Rose’s friends and the world that she has been inhabiting.

“There are moments when everything becomes clear and sharply drawn, moments that stand out in memory like three-dimensional figures against a flat background. I can remember now everything about that moment; the exact pinkish colour of the light, the pale patch in the carpet where a stain had been removed, the single cobweb strand that hung from the ceiling and moved gently in the breeze from the window. Humphrey’s back was to the light, his head was tilted towards me at a slightly enquiring angle as though he had just asked a question and was waiting for me to answer it. There was a small smile on his thin mouth, a timid, almost conciliatory smile.”

Will is something of a romantic; he is drawn to Rose and her unhappiness, his faith in his old friend and all he knew of him severely shaken. Several of the characters are destroyed, or have been by the shady world of the Odd Flamingo, but it is Will who seems most affected by these events, the reader gets the impression that Will Hunt will be marked by his experiences. Like Rose, there is something of the innocent in Will, and like Rose, his association with the Odd Flamingo and the events which take place over a few short weeks put an end to that innocence.

This is an enjoyable mystery which could be of interest to readers of Nina Bawden’s later literary novels. Bello books who produce ebooks and print on demand books have a few of these early books available.

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Ruffian on the Stair – Nina Bawden (2001)

(This modern virago cover art is awful I think, and dreadfully misleading)
There are those books which it is really hard to convey just how good they are in a mere review, this is one such novel, which all goes to show, books should just be read to be appreciated. Ruffian on the Stair was Nina Bawden’s last novel published in 2001 four years before her book Dear Austen, the letter she wrote to her husband Austen Kark who was killed in the Potter’s Bar rail crash in 2002, when Nina Bawden was badly injured. If you are wondering about the title, as I was, this verse is quoted in the front of the novel.

“Madam Life’s a piece in bloom
Death goes digging everywhere
She’s the tenant of the room
He’s the ruffian on the stair
W.E Henley

Silas Mudd just days away from his one hundredth birthday, is something of a wily old sod, his deafness coming and going as it suits him. As the preparations for a special family lunch to celebrate, get underway Silas come to reflect on his long life. He remembers those who he has lost, his two wives, the aunt who brought him up following his mother’s tragic death, his father and his beloved sister. It is the tragedy of such longevity that everyone, one knew when young, and so many people one has loved, are already long gone, Bawden was only in her mid-seventies when she wrote this novel, and yet she seems to have understood the sadness and loneliness of such old age keenly.

Silas’s grown up children and step children are due to attend the lunch, but still have their own concerns to attend to in the midst of worries over gifts and seating plans. Silas’s son Will, many years younger than his two elder sisters, neither of whom live in London, is recovering from Pneumonia in hospital, while his wife Coral, an actress is preparing to play Gertrude in Brighton. On the way home from visiting her husband in hospital, Coral undergoes a frightening experience, that she later feels unable to talk about to anyone, and is constantly berating herself for – her secrecy leading Will to allow his imagination to run wild. Silas’s eldest daughter Hannah lives in Yorkshire with her husband Julius, and lots of sheep, her daughter one of the family not invited to the lunch. Hannah’s not sure at all how Silas would react to his thirty-something granddaughter being unmarried and pregnant anyway. However what bothers Hannah even more is just what is it that Silas’s step-daughter Clare is planning? Clare the daughter of Silas’s second wife Bella is a particular favourite of Silas’s much to the irritation of other family members. Alice, the sister that comes between Hannah and Will is a world famous science Professor, travelling from Australia for the lunch having been attending a conference, she’s due to stay with Will and Coral.

“Since Bella’s death, Silas has become a traveller in time. He sits with a book on his lap – he doesn’t want to be seen as an old man, dreaming – and allows his mind to run free. He sees- feels –his past life as a vast, echoing tunnel, or underground cave. He journeys through it and around it, mining the seam of his personal history; hidden or half-forgotten events barely glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, a brief flash of light in the darkness, other dwelt upon, constantly revisited, permanently lit. He can traverse a decade in a matter of seconds or linger for days on a single moment, in a particular room.”

While Silas’s children and step children worry over birthday celebrations and family politics, Silas spends most of his time, where he now feels most comfortable – the past. Re-living his childhood, and then his love affair with his first wife the socially superior Effie, their marriage and the years with their two daughters before the Second World War disrupted everything, and Effie’s late pre-menopausal baby Will came along – which would lead eventually to her early death. Silas remembers his joys, his disappointments and the secrets he kept.

Nina Bawden is brilliant at exploring the intricacies of family life, and in The Ruffian on the Stair, she also explores, the poignancies, and pitfalls of extreme old age, injecting a little humour – and an awful lot of sympathetic understanding along the way. This novel was a real surprise, I had expected to really like it, but hadn’t expected it turn out a five star read which kept me up till 1.30 to finish.

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A Woman of my Age – Nina Bawden (1967)

Last month, Karen of Kaggsysbookishramblings and Simon of Stuck in a book had a read-a-long of Nina Bawden’s A Woman of my Age. I wanted to join in, and then a fellow librarything member sent me a copy of the book, but I have only just got around to reading it.
Nina Bawden’s Carrie’s War was one of my all-time favourite children’s books and I really enjoyed the couple of Bawden’s adult books I read last year. I find Bawden’s writing very engaging, her characters strong and believable their lives are fully explored and often portrayed with sharp humour – after reading The Devil by the Sea and A Grain of Truth I wanted to read all of Bawden’s novels for adults. I enjoyed ‘A woman of my age’ very much – although not quite as much as those two books I just mentioned, for me there were a few little odd things which jarred slightly.

“When I look in the mirror – not to see if the grey roots are beginning to show before the next tinting, but in the same way I used to look at myself when I was seventeen, at what, whom and why – I remain, as I did then, cloudy, fading, sadly out of focus. I do not know myself, only my own situation: I am Elizabeth Jourdelay, married to Richard, the mother of his two sons. I am, I am middle aged. This is an embarrassment that has come upon me suddenly, taking me by surprise so that I don’t really believe it. Looking in the mirror I see the wrinkles, but perhaps tomorrow they will be gone and my skin will be smooth again. Though wrinkles are not important. The important thing is that I am in the middle of my life and I feel as I did when I was adolescent, that I do not know where to go from here.
What of the time between? What have I done – become – during twenty long battling years? Is there no answer, no key?”

In ‘A Woman of my Age’ we meet Elizabeth – a woman of about 37 – who having been married for around eighteen years is no longer very interested in her husband and considers herself middle aged. Travelling in Morocco with her husband Richard, allows Elizabeth time to look back over her life, how is it she has ended up where she is? Brought up by two aunts who had worked for the suffrage movement and taught her to engage in politics, Elizabeth left university without taking her degree in order to marry Richard. Richard is a handsome, charming man, quite persuasive and prone to bursts of temper he is happiest with Elizabeth undertaking the traditional wife and mother role. There were times in her younger years when Elizabeth was frustrated by her life, yearning for a chance to work – however humbly – within the political arena – yet she finds herself sacrificing her ambitions for her family. Elizabeth’s view of herself and her relationship will surprise – maybe shock many modern readers,  shrugging off her husband hitting her during a particularly bad row.

In the searing heat of the Moroccan desert – Elizabeth and Richard meet two other couples. Flora is an old friend – particularly of Richard’s – Elizabeth hasn’t seen her for a number of years. Flora a woman of around 40 is travelling with her young lover Adam. The other couple are the Hobbs – a couple in their 60’s, Mrs Hobbs is good hearted friendly woman, very large and rather unwell, she and her husband are devoted to one another. Initially the Hobbs’ are a couple that Elizabeth and Richard smile at behind their backs, finding them slightly ridiculous – but Elizabeth quickly becomes genuinely fond of them. Sexually uninterested in her husband, resisting his advances when she can, Elizabeth is amazed to find herself an object of attraction to both Adam and Mr Hobbs – she is further surprised by her own reaction to them. As the group continue their journey across the desert –the sexual tensions that have built up have life changing consequences for almost everyone.
There is quite a twist in the ending of this novel- not something I saw coming, and certainly it wasn’t the ending that I would have chosen. I don’t want to give away too much – in case anyone else is thinking of reading it soon – but I suspect it is an ending which dismays many readers. However – while it is not the ending I would have chosen – it did make a sort of peculiar sense for me. Throughout the novel, Elizabeth indulges in a good deal of introspective navel gazing – she’s a little bit whiney I suppose. Her life is dull – she is disappointed by how it has turned out – but she never really does much about it –the reader sees how there were times when she nearly had – but just never quite managed it. Even in Morocco there is a moment when the reader thinks Elizabeth is going to strike out on her own – but here again she goes back to what is easy – it is as if Elizabeth is simply unable to go the whole hog – she’s good at talking about it – ruminating on her lot – but she just slips back into the old routine. Elizabeth emerges as a woman repeating the mistakes of her youth in middle age – destined to live out the same life again. Nina Bawden allows her readers to really know her characters – and while we all may interpret their motivations slightly differently – we have these complex not always likeable people set out before us – and in just 200 pages or so, we have their whole lives laid bare.

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Devil by the Sea – Nina Bawden (1976)

I already had got this book on my all Virago all August pile for this month, when I heard the news on Wednesday that Nina Bawden had died at the age of 87.
Like many readers I was first introduced to Nina Bawden as a child, when I read Carrie’s War, which has always remained one of my top three favourite children’s books. A few months ago I read The Grain of Truth – the first of Nina Bawden’s adult novels I had read.
Devil by the Sea – I can imagine not being to everyone’s taste – it is a chillingly dark story. The strange and claustrophobic world of a seaside town at the end of the season is seen through the eyes of unattractive nine year old Hilary. She and her family live in the town, her seven year old brother Peregrine is good while she, Hilary believes is bad. Janet, their seventeen year old half-sister is preoccupied with her innocent dalliance with a married man and the continuing battles with her step-mother. Auntie a once free spirit is now deaf, spends her days secretly beachcombing, hiding her “treasures” in a cave. Hilary’s father Charles goes off to work in the shop each morning, while his wife Alice stays at home. The adults, each concerned with their own lives fail to listen to Hilary.
As the novel opens, Hilary and Peregrine are watching an outdoor seaside show, their half-sister is supposed to be watching them, but is busy with her boyfriend. It is here they see the man Hilary and Peregrine call the Devil.

“Looking at the man sitting next to them, the children thought he must be old too, or sick. He wore a full-skirted naval bridge coat and a blue woollen muffler knotted round his neck. Beneath his cloth cap his face was thin, the cheeks so hollow that his mouth stuck forwards like a dog’s mouth.”

They watch as the man leads another child away, Hilary is at once horrified and fascinated by the man, who slowly draws her into his net. The child Hilary watched him lead away is pictured in the paper the next day, and Hilary knows he is the Devil. Bawden’s depiction of children, their way of thinking, is brilliantly done. Hilary is by turn terrified and interested in the man, she promises to meet him again, but later is terrified of seeing him, of him seeing her in the window of her bedroom.

“She knew him now, for certain, and the knowledge was terrible. She pressed herself against the cold bars, hoping that stillness might save her. What she could not see from the window, her memory supplied: the wide, black coat sweeping low over the twisted foot. Feeling his eyes burn into her, she gave a low cry and closed her own. Holding herself rigid, she thought: he won’t recognise me, not in my nightgown. And then she knew, with awful certainty, that God had marked her for just this occasion. For what other reason, when she had been born so plain, had she been given her one beauty, her bright, unmistakeable, red hair?”

The adults live in fear – there is a murderer in the town, and they want him caught. However the atmosphere of fear which hangs over them all doesn’t stop them being too preoccupied to listen and see what is happening.
There was one slightly odd thing for me – which doesn’t detract from an enjoyable book at all. In the Grain of Truth (1968) that I mentioned I read a while back, the central character’s back story concerns the death of a child who she had always believed she had killed in game not ever realising the boy had an illness. This incident is almost exactly the same as an incident in Hilary’s own back story in this novel. Strange that Nina Bawden should use the same thing twice.
Nina Bawden’s storytelling is compelling, the confusing, frightening world of things we don’t quite understand as children, is a dark place, and one that Nina Bawden understood well. I enjoyed this book a lot, and have more Nina Bawden TBR that I look forward to.

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The Grain of Truth – Nina Bawden (1968)

Emma’s anxious and manipulative plea, ‘Someone listen to me’, opens- and closes- this deliciously uncomfortable novel in which Nina Bawden explores myriad emotional disguises with her characteristic acuity. When Emma’s father-in-law falls down the stairs to his death, she is convinced she pushed him in an act of wish-fulfilment. To her husband Henry and her close friend Holly, this is unthinkable. Guilt is simply Emma’s obsession in a humdrum domestic existence enlivened by romantic fantasy. For Holly, who successfully fields a string of love affairs, sexual pleasures are more easily attainable, whereas Henry, a Divorce lawyer, prides himself on being a realist. Each tells their story in turn, illuminating and distorting their separate versions of the truth. As they do so, an intricate jigsaw of the private deceits with which they shore up everyday life emerges.

My first and up to now only experience of Nina Bawden’s writing was many many years ago, when as a child I read Carrie’s War – one of my all-time favourite children’s stories.

I actually have two other Nina Bawden novels on my TBR – and now having read this one I eagerly anticipate them.

Emma and her husband Henry live with their young twin sons in Henry’s father’s large house. Their best friends Holly and Felix live opposite. When her father in law falls to his death, Emma is convinced she is responsible. Was she? Did the old man fall or was he pushed? Emma lives inside her own head – her dreamlike fantasies, both romantic and guilt ridden become gradually more obsessive. Each character sees Emma differently. Henry sees Emma as a fragile little flower; Holly has a more complex viewpoint – believing her to be at once conventional and manipulative, while her husband Felix sees her as a saint. The narrative is told by Emma, Holly and Henry by turn, as they gradually try to unravel the truth behind the tragic incident.
There is a surprisingly claustrophobic atmosphere to this quite dark little novel. ‘The Grain of Truth’ opens and closes with Emma’s plea to be heard, her mother had not listened to her years before – and this has left an indelible mark. None of the characters are really that likeable – although I felt more sympathy for Emma in her suffocating life, with her rather priggish husband, up tight mother and bed hopping best friend.
I found this to be an enjoyable read from an author who wrote quite a number of books for adults, which I can now look forward to reading.

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